The Psychology of Brand Experience and Experiential Marketing

Experiential Marketing

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely”—Auguste Rodin

In essence, experiential marketing is all about taking a client’s brief, coming up with a creative idea and, by using both live and digital communication platforms, delivering a campaign that achieves whatever the desired results may be.

This may be led by a clever idea or by the use of technology. I wonder, however, how many times the user experience has been fully considered or the idea has been rigorously tested?

Certainly in my experience these are aspects that are sometimes left on the back-burner due to limited time, shortage of human resource, work over-load, or simply down to a lack of the required skill-set.

I also feel that the complexity of truly great work in experiential marketing is sometimes overlooked. For instance, it has to be integrated across digital and real-world landscapes, which are user-friendly, fun, memorable, and always communicates the brand’s message effectively and delivers ROI. To do this in a consistent and innovative way is extremely challenging.

Nevertheless, when campaigns go live individuals are going to experience them either way. Consequently, it seems to make much more sense to scrupulously plan for a fantastic user experience rather than leave it to chance.

This is where borrowing principles and practices from UX Design might assist us to better design and deliver great experiential marketing campaigns.

What is User Experience Design?

According to a study from the Oxford Journal, Interacting With Computers, the goal of UX Design in business is to “improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”

In other words, UX is all about how people feel and engage with products and services across all touch points; whether these experiences are memorable and shareable, positive or negative, can be down to good or bad design.

A great blog on UX Design is by Joel Marsh. He goes further and states: “UX Design involves a process very similar to doing science: we do research to understand the users, we develop ideas to solve the users’ needs — and the needs of the business — and we build and measure those solutions in the real world to see if they work.”

As a result, we can think of three fundamental pillars in a UX approach to design:

Research to understand the user and their behaviour.

Create and design ideas with empathy.

A discipline of prototyping and testing.

Lets discuss these further below.

Pillars of UX Design

(1) Research to understand the user and their behaviour

Immerse yourself in your users’ world to understand what they do and why they do it. This will help decipher what exactly users’ needs and wants are, which in turn, inspires the creation of ideas.

You need get to know your audience—really know them. So go beyond demographics like average age, income and media habits to find out what makes them tick. What gets them excited? What worries them? What do they talk to others about? Why and how do they use your brand, and what do they love about it already?

You can do this by utilising market research techniques, such as interviews, focus groups, observations, surveys, or analyzing quantitative data for insights.

This is common practice in the other parts marketing mix, but I would argue that it is far from ubiquitous within experiential marketing agencies. In your experience, would you agree?

(2) Create and design ideas with empathy

In UX, empathy is a key ingredient in order to build effective user experiences. Getting inside the heads of individuals and having to ability to really walk in their shoes puts UX Designers at the forefront of a cultural change in business to a more customer-centric world.

As a result, coming up with ideas gathered from insights in the research stage that are fully in line with the target consumers needs, as well as the objectives of your client, is crucial.

Customer journey mapping can also be a very useful tool to help in maintaining your focus on empathy with costumers as they interact with your campaign across all the suitable touch points.

(3) A discipline of prototyping and testing

Next, you need to prototype the most promising ideas that come out of stage two of the process and evaluate them more accurately to see which offer true potential.

By prototyping, I mean a process where an initial version of an idea, product or service is tested to make sure it is fit for the audience and purpose. If there are any errors or problems, the prototype is improved and tested again. This goes on until the product or service is considered to be fully functional and suitable.

The MIT Media Lab, for instance, lives by the motto, “Demo or die,” which recognises that only the act of prototyping can transform an idea into something truly valuable—on their own, ideas are ten-a-penny.

For example, the user experience across all aspects of an experiential campaign—from technology, to digital, to social media, to on-site production, to media buying, or whatever other touch points are used—need to be tested. Ask questions like:

Does every interaction work smoothly for the user?

Does it look visually pleasing?

Does it engage emotionally?

Does it stimulate the senses?

Does it enhances the overall experience for the user?

Does it add real value to the user?

Does it effectively communicate the brand’s message?

I feel this is a really important aspect of design that we need to start incorporating into experiential marketing. Otherwise, how can we keep innovating and evolve beyond a stab-in-the-dark, hit-and-miss, type approach?

I wonder do any agencies out there already have a system of prototyping ideas for their campaigns? Do brand managers feel this would offer more value to experiential campaigns for their brands?

Problems with Implementing a UX Approach in Experiential Marketing

I know what some of you must be saying: “Yes, this sounds great, but how can we fit this in when we are already under so much pressure with limited time and budget?”

Well, valid point. However, my argument is this: By creating a design process that can be drawn upon when approaching every experiential campaign it will actually produce faster, more predicable results. For instance:

On agency-side, it can be used to better flush out great ideas that are fully focused on the end user and stand up after being tested—increasing the chances for more effective campaigns. On client-side, they can have full confidence in the rigorous approach your agency has to every project—increasing the chances of new account wins and improving relationships with existing accounts.

Concluding remarks…

UX is about two things only – the User and the Experience. Give your users a positive experience and they will reward you with their trust and their business.

In the context of experiential marketing, this means that you have to ensure live brand experiences don’t waste individuals’ time, with gimmicky, hollow, unemotional campaigns and activations. Instead, they need to be engaging and memorable user experiences where consumers are captivated and enthralled across all relevant touch points.

This is especially true when you consider that, over the coming years, the volume of experiential activity is going to increase at an even faster pace compared with what we’ve seen in 2015. As a result, the possibility of consumers getting bored and weary of substandard, mediocre experiential marketing campaigns become evermore likely.

Subsequently, the best way to ensure your future experiential campaigns are innovative, unforgettable and enjoyable experiences, are perfectly aligned with both consumers’ and brands’ needs, and produce more consistent results, is to incorporate design thinking into the heart of how you approach experiential marketing.

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Since about 2012, the word “immersive” has taken a stranglehold in the vocabulary of experiential marketing. Now, if it is not immersive, or at least say it is immersive in your campaign pitch, it is not going to cut the mustard—as the saying goes here in merry old England. Nowadays, you get immersive “everything”—from immersive theatre and cinema, to immersive dinning experiences and brand activations—but what lies behind the word, and is it more than a fad solely being used for the jargon-lovers out there in the industry?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines immersive as “seeming to surround the audience, player, etc. so that they feel completely involved in something.” Adapted in to the context of brand experience and experiential marketing, it can be defined as (my definition, by the way) “creating an environment which surrounds a user with a memorable and shareable experience that engages the mind and stimulates the senses.”

I guess, one may say that all events can be seen as immersive—whether the event is a music festival, sports event or a conference—all could fit into my previous definition. However, I would argue that to be a truly successful immersive experience in our industry, it has to tell a brand’s story with compelling narrative allowing individuals to have emotional engagements across both digital and face-to-face interactions. These stories have to be memorable and shareable in order to justify the investment in the experience.

Are live music events immersive?

The sharing of stories has a long association with human evolution. In fact, Anthropologists have long argued its importance to our very existence and psychology research has shown that it exerts a big influence on human behaviour. This is due to the fact that we are such highly social animals and, consequently, a story has many powers within complex human social structures. For example, they can help build new relationships and alliances or reinforce them, establish social status, pass on knowledge, express self-identity, or be a catalyst for disruptive change. This is why great storytelling has to be central to immersive experiences, and why brands need to tap into this pivotal part of human life by telling a compelling story and having a strong brand purpose.

You see, we are now living in a world where, for consumers, it is no longer simply about which product or service to buy anymore, but about the overall experience they have with a brand at every point of contact. This is where offering immersive experiences can be a key differentiating factor, which help to win over the hearts and minds of consumers.

Immersive experiences across a “Mixed Reality” universe

The term “Mixed Reality” encompasses five spaces:

Real-Life Environment;

Augmented Reality;

Virtual Reality;

Alternate Reality;

Digital Environment.

This is the universe we need to populate with our stories to create a truly immersive experience that fully engage people and get them sharing and remembering your campaigns.

Real-Life Environment

This is where the live event is staged. Here, we need to design and deliver events that offer a fully immersive experience to the people who visit, which communicates a brand’s message clearly, memorably and is on-brand.

To do this, I think it helps to firstly think of these people as participants rather than attendees. If we do this, we immediately change the role of the consumer; moving from passive observer to engaged participant. This really helps in the design phase to create experiential marketing events that are both more interactive and focused on the user experience.

One thing to take note of: Technology is hugely important to live experiences. However, in my opinion, it needs to be used wisely and strategically, where it is fully integrated with and supports the brand’s campaign story and message.

Augmented Reality

AR’s potential for mass engagement is huge, due to the sheer amount of people who own smartphones—currently around two billion worldwide. It’s magical because it can create a world simply by pointing a smartphone at an object. How does it do this? “…The technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality.Augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulable. Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world” (Wikipedia, 2015).

See the video below for a glimpse of its potential for experiential marketing campaigns.

Virtual Reality

VR replicates an environment that simulates a physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds and lets the user interact in that world. It can create sensory experiences, which can include sight, hearing, touch, and smell.

2016 is going to be a big year for VR. Big names within the tech world are rolling out their products, which offer great opportunities for the experiential industry. Facebook’s Oculas Rift, Samsung and Google, all have products ranging from £200 to just £4 for google cardboard.

Already there have been some great examples of VR being used in experiential campaigns. In particular, one to look at came from the live brand experience agency, BEcause, who recently had campaign using Oculas Rift headsets called the Sensorium.

Have a look at the video below of Mark Zuckerberg discussing back in October 2015 why virtual reality is the next big thing.

Alternate Reality

Alternate Reality is a really interesting way of immersing people into your story. Essentially, alternate reality allows for a single story to be told via several different media at once. It was first identified in Japanese culture where young people became immersed in worlds and fantasies through stories being told in such things as Manga and Anime. It was eventually adopted into the American film industry, where, for example, the Star Wars’ franchise created its own universe telling its story across books, comics, cartons, video games as well as the iconic films, before it eventually evolved further into a marketing strategy known as Alternate Reality Games.

Analternate reality game is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and uses transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions. One great example of this was for the Hollywood blockbuster, Batman: The Dark Night. The agency 42 Entertainment were behind the campaign. This is what they had to say about the immersive experience:

“”Why So Serious?” was designed as a 360° alternate reality experience that played out over 15 months leading up to the release of The Dark Knight. Spilling out over a multitude of different platforms, this deep immersive campaign recruited the audience to become real citizens of Gotham City. Over 11 million unique participants in over 75 countries fueled the rise of the Joker as henchmen, campaigned for Harvey Dent to get elected as District Attorney, and even took the law into their own hands by becoming copycat Batman vigilantes. From calling phone numbers written in the sky, to hunting down GPS coordinates to find mobile phones baked inside of birthday cakes, “Why So Serious?” was an experience like no other. As these fans collectively scoured the globe in search of clues, their incredible passion generated billions of impressions in the press and blogosphere setting a new benchmark for immersive entertainment.”

Digital Environment

Having a strong social media presence is paramount to immersive experiences, as they allow people to have their own personal input to the story. Opening up conversations via the plethora of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Instagram, Snapchat, lets people get immersed by providing communication channels for them to comment, review, share, etc., which maximizes engagement and amplifies the digital reach of experiential marketing campaigns. You need to treat Social media as the glue connecting all the other areas in the “mixed reality” universe.

Creating the universe

Now lets put it all together with an imaginary case study…

Tesla Motors Campaign: “The Future City Is Now”

“Tesla Motors hired us to launch a new electric car for them, which was to enter the small, city-car market. The campaign was built around the title, “The Future City Is Now”. Here, we presented “Future City”; a place that is clean, sustainable, powered by renewable energy and everyone is using electric cars. All the technology showcased currently exists and could transform cities in the short-term if consumers’ and governments’ behaviour changed.

A year before the event, via our partner agency, we created and activated an Alternate Reality Game, where gamification and great storytelling immersed people into this new world, allowing them to experience life in “Future City”. The storyline supported the wider advertising campaign taking place across other media platforms. This helped drive interest and online participation in the build up to the launch, resulting in over 55 million You Tube views and over 15 million people becoming “Future City” residents.

The launch event took place at the International Motor Show in Germany—the largest of its kind in the world. This was a state-of-the-art set-build around the theme “The Future City Is Now”. A partnership was made with an agency to develop and deliver an AR and VR immersive experience at the launch event. This transported key influencers at the motor show into the “The Future City Is Now” world, which generated huge reach through press channels and the blogosphere.

A Social Media strategy was also developed to support all the areas above that reached out to communities and amplified the campaign’s story, resulting billions of impressions. Social Media was particularly key to the success of the alternate reality game.”

To sum up…

In order to offer genuine immersive experiences to an ever increasingly savvy consumer, firstly we need have compelling storytelling that truly immerses people into the brand’s world and message; without it, people are simply not going to be engaged with the content. We then need to tell these stories across the spaces in the “mixed reality” universe. Every campaign is different and budgets vary, so all of these spaces may not be suitable. Nonetheless, trying to incorporate as many as you’re capable of, or think fits best to achieve the campaign’s objectives, will ensure you are providing the most immersive experience possible to evoke human emotions and build brand love. This, ultimately, adds real value to brands and increases ROIs on their experiential marketing campaigns.

Remember: Immersive experiences can be more than just an experience at the event or putting on a virtual reality headset. They can transport people into new worlds and realities with the power of storytelling across the different touch points on the customer journey.

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The reciprocation rule is hugely powerful. Sociologists and anthropologists have found evidence of its existence in every human society, with it being deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.

Indeed, this rule could very well be the basis of how we, as a species, succeeded above all others, as it allowed individuals to form robust and complex relationships by building trust, allowing for collaboration, and encouraging the exchange goods and services—all without the fear of loosing any investment.

The influential French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, described social pressures as: “There is an obligation to give, an obligation to receive, and an obligation to repay”. In other words, a favour would be guaranteed with a favour in return and, importantly, would be received, or else society shuns the individual who does not obey the rule.

In particular, there are two situations in which research has suggested the rule mainly takes place. Firstly, as before mentioned, it can be employed by providing a person with a favour and then asking for one in return, and secondly, by making a concession to an individual who has already made a concession to us. Lets take a look at the two in a little more detail and how it relates to experiential marketing.

The “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” scenario

This is the more obvious situation and is commonplace in everyday life, business and politics. It is invoked by the feeling of the need to return a favour and, is so powerful, psychology research has shown it enhances the chance of compliance even in a situation where you may dislike the person who originally gave the favour, or you did not want the favour in the first place.

I, for one, used to be terrified of taking a bit of free Comté at the cheese stall for fear of being trapped into spending a small fortune (No longer a problem and now love the freebies, rule-free… ish). No wonder product sampling is still such an important marketing strategy for brands. Lets look at a simple, but very famous, example of an experiment from Cornell University to better understand how the rule can be exploited.

The study pretended to be about rating art paintings but its true purpose was to test the rule. It was carried out multiple times with different participants, but it always only featured a confederate (a person in on the experiment) and one participant for each of the two conditions.

In the first condition, the confederate would leave the room for a few minutes and, upon returning, would state that they had “bought two cokes in the vending machine” and offer a free one to the participant (all the different participants in the tests excepted the coke). In the second condition the confederate would leave the room for a few minutes again but this time would not return with any soft drink to offer the participant.

Later on, the confederate asked the participant in the different conditions if they could do him a favour by buying some charity raffle tickets. In the condition where the confederate had given the unwanted gift, the free coke, the participant was under the rule’s spell and purchased many more tickets when compared to the other condition. Thus, in the first condition, they felt obligated to return the earlier favour and, in most cases, spent much more money on the raffle tickets compared to what the confederate spent on the coke.

The “Okay, you won’t do that, but how about doing this, instead” scenario

This is a much more subtle way the rule can have influence. It is built on the premise that people will be more likely to become compliant from a non-compliant position. In other words, when a larger request changes to a smaller request it appears as a concession on the part of the requester—the so called rejection-then-retreat technique. For example, one psychology experiment demonstrates this rule perfectly.

Students walking around a university campus were picked at random by the incognito researchers and asked whether they would be willing to help a “County Youth Counseling Programme” by chaperoning a group of juvenile delinquents for a day-trip to a zoo without any payment. Not surprisingly, out of the group asked only 17% said yes.

Next, the researchers added an additional variable when asking a new sample of students. Firstly, they asked if they would be willing to sign-up for a programme of two hours per week to be a counselor to a juvenile delinquent for a minimum of two years without pay; unsurprisingly, they all refused. They then asked the smaller request about the zoo-trip and magically the results went up to 50% compliance from 17%, earlier.

As is evident, the reciprocation rule can be used very cleverly in the right hands. Shrewd negotiators and high-performing sales people are fully aware of this persuasive trick. One thing to note about this tactic is that it can backfire if used poorly. For instance, if the initial request is too extreme, or obviously unreasonable, then bargaining will breakdown as it will be seen as not being in good faith.

So… is experiential marketing built on the foundation of the reciprocation rule?

I would say, yes, most definitely. As we know, experiential marketing is a form of advertising that allows brands to create experiences for consumers—via live events, shopping experiences, or product sampling, for example—which brands hope to generate customer loyalty and influence purchasing decisions. Arguably, these all engage the rule, as it creates a platform where individuals can be influenced. Lets take an example from an excellent experiential event I wrote about in a previous blog post.

The brand was Campo Viejo, a Spanish wine brand, and took place in the Southbank in London. The event had many characteristics that offered the potential for the rule to influence people in attendance.

The event was free;

it had lots of Spanish pop-up food stalls, which, although were not free, provided people with delicious, genuine Spanish cuisine from Barcelona;

it had wine priced very reasonably;

it provided a free sensory experience, which allowed people to take part in a world-first experiment called Soundscape;

it had free wine blending classes;

it had free live music in the day and DJs at night;

and generally created a great street festival atmosphere that all attendees seemed to be enjoying thoroughly.

All these things combined left me feeling very warm and friendly about the brand, with a positive sense of indebtedness—as if your friend had invited you around to their house for a dinner party. I shared the experience via social channels, as did many others, and I am not ashamed to admit it influenced the purchase of a few bottles since. And judging by the huge numbers in attendance one can only imagine a large amount of these people were influenced by the rule, too. When you get to attend a great experiential event, especially with the magical word “free”, you can’t help but feel some obligation to the brand and form a bias to them over their competitors.

How the rule can directly benefit your next experiential campaign:

Generate better brand loyalty

Improve amplification through media channels

Influence the future decision process

Encourage behavioural change

Get people to give you £5 (Only joking)

As we can see, the rule is hugely influential within experiential marketing, even if we are not always perhaps aware of it when creating and delivering activations and campaigns. Consequently, if you can take one thing from this blog post, it is to not just let things happen accidentally or by chance, but pay close attention to the rule in both the design and delivery phases and plan to influence by using the power of this persuasion technique.

These ideas have been borrowed from the pioneer in the science of persuasion, Robert Cialdini, and his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

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Are you drawn to this image? If so, is it your conscious or unconscious mind that draws you to it?

What do you get when you cross advanced research technologies of neuroscience with the drive and ambition of marketing… you guessed it, neuromarketing! Also known under the name of consumer neuroscience, but this is generally a term used within the realms of academia. In recent times it has even been heralded as the tool to find the Holly Grail in marketing: the”buy button” in the brain. No pressure then neuromarketing. All jokes aside, neuromarketing is surely something to be taken very seriously; particularly with the rise of more cost-effective and accessible options coming into the marketplace in the future, balanced with big-data analytics that ensure the insights are used in the most strategic and effective ways.

I first came across the subject whilst searching for an online course to take on the P2P educational platform, Coursera. Here, Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, a leading academic in the field from the Copenhagen Business School, was offering an online course entitled An Introduction to Consumer Neuroscience and Neuromarketing. I was captivated, and straight away thought how this could be applied to live events and experiential marketing. But what is neuromarketing, you may be wondering after all my waffle.

The nice people over at www.neurosciencemarketing.com had this to say about the field: “Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience to marketing. Neuromarketing includes the direct use of brain imaging, scanning, or other brain activity measurement technology to measure a subject’s response to specific products, packaging, advertising, or other marketing elements. In some cases, the brain responses measured by these techniques may not be consciously perceived by the subject; hence, this data may be more revealing than self-reporting on surveys, in focus groups, etc.” In other words, it uses neuroscience technologies to monitor psychological changes in our bodies, which is very useful in order to dig deeper and predict behaviour and influence decision-making. Watch the YouTube video below for an entertaining and insightful introduction to neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise at a TED X talk.

Neuromarketing Technologies

To gain a deeper insight into the human brain and consumers’ decision-making, nueromarketers use a number of research technologies. For example:

EEG Tests: Electroencephalography (if you can pronounce it give yourself a pat on the back) is a technology that measures fluctuations in the electrical activity directly below the scalp, which occurs as a result of neural activity. When electrodes are attached to willing participants’ heads electrical patterns of their brainwaves can be evaluated, shedding light on the inner visceral responses we humans have.

EEG Sensor Cap

The intensity of such things as anger, lust, disgust, excitement can all be detected. Indeed, all very useful in order to design and test for emotional impact on live events and experiential marketing before launching campaigns, don’t you think?

FMRI: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine measures brain activity by looking at changes in the blood flow to the brain.

FMRI Machine

When a brain area is more active it consumes more oxygen and, to meet this increased demand, blood flow increases to the active area. FMRI can be used to produce activation maps showing which parts of the brain are involved in a particular mental process. Although they offer exceptional opportunities for insights into our brain, these machines are very costly to use.

Eye Tracking: In the simplest terms, eye tracking is the measurement of eye activity. Where do we look? What do we ignore? When do we blink? How does the pupil react to different stimuli? The data are collected using either a remote or head-mounted ‘eye tracker’ connected to a computer, which needs to be analyzed. The fields of advertising, entertainment, packaging and web design have all benefited significantly from studying the visual behavior of the consumer.

Eye Tracking Technology

Facial Coding: The concept of facial coding is that we reveal our emotions through our facial expressions. Even if we feel that we are revealing no expression, the ultimate poker face, micro-expressions are taking place. So if facial coding was to be hooked up to you on Christmas Day there would be no hiding the disappointment on your face after receiving another pair of socks from your sister-in-law.

Interesting research studies

A landmark piece of research within the field is the Coke vs Pepsi study. The study was conducted by researchers exploring the motivation behind brand preferences, using brand rivals Pepsi and Coke as their experimental apparatus. The experiment was simple, using only two taste tests. One would be a blind tasting of the two fizzy drinks, and another tasting where the subjects were aware of which of the brands they were drinking.

When the participants in the study drank each of the highly sugared drinks without knowing the brand, activity was recorded in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is believed to be the reward epicenter in the brain. As a result, there was an even split between the subjects’ preferences for both of the drinks — about 50/50. However, when the test subjects knew the identity of the brands a significant difference occurred. For instance, in the taste tests, there was no change in brain patterns for Pepsi when sampled knowing the brand when contrasted with the anonymous task. In comparison, for coke, the brain showed activity in the hippocampus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; both of which have been implicated in modifying behavior based on emotion and affect, and are commonly associated in aspects of cognitive control, including memory. Even when a double-blind taste test was conducted (Coke in both samples but only one showing the brand) much more activity took place in the brain for the sample that the subjects knew was Coke. Consequently, this highlighted that when people drink coke they attach more importance to the emotional connection and memories they have with the brand as they do to the taste of the cola. This, for the first time, illustrated the power of a brand’s identity and how it communicates and connects with consumers subconsciously.

Another interesting study was carried out at Emory University. Here, neuroeconomic researchers found evidence that activity in reward-related regions of the brain, notably the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, is predictive of future purchasing decisions of popular music. They used fMRI to measure the brain responses of a small group of adolescents while listening to songs of largely unknown artists. Then, the researchers analyzed the music sales for the three years following the original experiment. It showed very accurately that certain songs that had shown more neural activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum sold more songs than those that had less activity. Thus, the researchers concluded that “these results suggest that the neural responses to goods are not only predictive of purchase decisions for those individuals actually scanned, but such responses generalize to the population at large and may be used to predict cultural popularity.”

Hollywood has also embraced neuromarketing. A Boston-based consumer neuroscience research firm established a link between box-office opening weekend takings and its emotional connection it made with test subjects. They were wearing “biometric belts” that captured their “emotional engagement” by sensing related skin sweat, heart rate, breathing, and motion responses. It found that if a film’s trailer failed to reach a specific emotional engagement threshold (65), it will very likely generate less than $10 million in revenue on opening weekend; a movie whose trailer exceeds a certain level (80) will very likely earn more than $20 million the first weekend.

All very cool, don’t you think? I certainly do. I really find it fascinating, and these tools could certainly be used to improve design, creativity and, overall, provide more consistent results and ROI within the experiential and event industries.

The Verdict

When compared to other marketing research techniques the cost versus the benefit is the big issue. Although costs are sure to come down in the near future, for agencies it will still be hard to get their clients to cough up for the extra expense of neuromarketing. That being said, I still feel that opportunities are abound to design and create more consistently engaging and immersive experiences by using these types of technologies. This is cutting-edge, and will surely be a wow factor in a pitch if you could offer this kind of sophisticated research techniques, by partnering with a neuromarketing agency. It could be particularly interesting for global brands wishing to activate large-scale live events or experiential campaigns.

Furthermore, if we look more holistically, by focusing on the overall brand experience in comparison to just a one-off experiential event, even more benefits become apparent. When you can dig deeper into the unconscious mind and accurately test how people are going to experience your brand through various touch points — mobile, face-to-face, advertising, for example — a complete strategy becomes clearly evident. Any weaknesses it the connecting chains can be identified in the development stage, whether this be digital or live, by monitoring activity in the relevant parts of the brain. Focus groups and surveys are not a reliable source for true insights, as people can’t be trusted to tell their true feelings about products and services. The brain, however, is a much more trust-worthy companion and a far better predictor of behaviour. So, events and experiential professionals out there, lets embrace neuroscience and boldly go where no experiential campaign has gone before.

Neuromarketing Agencies

For those of you who might be interested in exploring further and partnering with a neuromarketing research agency there are several neuromarketing companies out there, such as California-based Sales Brain and Oxford start-up Neurosense, who are using FMRI and other techniques to gain insights into consumer thought and behaviour for brands and agencies.

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Billed as a multi-sensory Spanish fiesta experience, I decided to head out into the field with my psychology hat firmly on to judge for myself at the Campo Viejo’s “Streets of Spain” experiential event. In its third year now, and boasting impressive stats from 2014, the festival kicked off with a bang on a cold May-Day Friday at the Southbank in South-East London. Miss Jones & Co were the agency behind the event, again trusted by Campo Viejo’s parent company, Pernod Ricard UK to deliver the goods. For the theme, food and wine took centre stage (unsurprisingly) with a sprinkling of art and music for extra spice.

The Sensory Experience

Sight

The first thing to hit your sensory pallet was the visual spectacle. Spread out along the banks of the River Thames was an expanse of street food tents serving all kinds of tasty Spanish food — A sight for sore eyes, indeed. And each tent was branded excellently too, offering a uniform look that made for a striking scene. Added to this, the London Eye in view, as well as House of Commons and The National Theatre close by, the Southbank is truly a great setting for an event of this kind.

Street vendors alongside the River Thames.

A large part of our unconscious mind is used to process the data that our eyes gathers everyday resulting in about a third of our brain handling vision. Evolution has seen to this as a key survival tool to avoid danger and forage for food. This is why we form split-second first impressions via our eyes. Consequently, it’s paramount to provide aesthetically pleasing venues, spaces, as well digital platforms for events and experiential marketing. Thankfully most of us in the business are well aware of this — I hope!

Smell

The next sense to be tickled was smell; the aroma swirling around the fresh spring evening air was simply amazing. Sizzling beef, spicy pádron peppers, paella, churros, patatas bravas, all providing a smell sensation, which recalled fond memories of a time when I lived in Spain for a year as an inquisitive seven-year old boy.

A powerful connection exists between the olfactory system (smell) and memory. For example, research into the subject has provided strong evidence that scent-encoded information achieves far greater longevity with individuals’ memory when compared to other sensory cues. In addition, another study in the area found memories triggered by scent were rated to be more emotional for individuals in an experiment compared with the other senses. The close neural proximity of the system dealing with smell and memory in the brain plays a large part in this strong relationship. For instance, the limbic system is home to the olfactory bulb (which is the area of the brain that processes smell), the amygdala (primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions), and the hippocampus (short-term and long-term memory); all of which heavily influence our emotional life and has a great deal to do with the formation of memories.

Street food

Taste

At an event like this, taste is obviously going to be an important sense to invigorate. I was drawn in by the smell and sound of fiery pádron peppers being cooked at a tent selling a dish described as the “Barcelona Bomb”. The ingredients were Wagyu beef served on a baked potato bed, with a sauce similar to alioli, which certainly did blow my taste buds away — delicious. Later I tried some seafood paella, which looked fantastic cooking in a massive dish.

Taste, more so than any of the other senses, we experience through those other senses. How something smells, how something looks, how it feels, even how it sounds, all influence our brain’s ability to process what something taste’s like. In particular, up to 80-90% of what we think things taste like are down to smell. This is because our taste receptors are limited by just five primary taste qualities: sour, sweet, salty, bitter and umami. Thus, alone, we can find it very hard to distinguish subtle flavours. This is why clever food-sellers prime our anticipation with lots of descriptive adjectives on menus and pay close attention to a dish’s presentation.

Sound

My ears were constantly immersed in the event; it appeared that most of the food tents were run by Spanish vendors, and many Spanish people were in attendance, resulting in the language being heard all over the place, as well as other Spanish dialects. If you closed your eyes, hearing the food sizzling, and the loud noises of people having fun on the street, you could indeed be in Barcelona, Madrid or San Sebastian. A music stage with bands during the day and DJs as night, as well as the Soundscape experiment (discussed below), provided further stimulation for the ears.

The significance of audition has been long recognised dating back to the 1950s when marketing and advertising began to sell us desires and wants as opposed to needs. Music jingles, music in T.V. and radio ads, connecting music with spaces such as hotels, retail outlets, restaurants, and airplanes, to create an atmosphere, as well how a product sound, all have been put to use to target our hearing sense in order to have emotional impact and influence behavior. Sound is also a key feature in most events and experiential activity; whether through music or microphone, this is a must to get right, but this is certainly not always the case, sadly.

The hustle and bustle of market street.

Touch

How did the touch fare? Probably the hardest of the senses to plan for in order to stimulate event-attendees compared with the others already mentioned. The main object consistently in my hand was a wine-cup (Well, it is being organised by a wine brand, so no judging please). The cups chosen for the event did give me nightmares. Perhaps it is due to my University days where many a bottle of wine were smuggled into the theatre, cinema or ballet (What, you’ve never smuggled wine in to the ballet?) and all one could use to drink from was a take-away coffee cup that invariably got soggy.

Haptics, the scientific term for touch, was believed by Aristotle to be the most highly regarded of the senses. He put it sitting above the other four in a hierarchical fashion set out in his theory, “aistheis”, meaning sensations, due to touch providing a true picture of the intrinsic nature of any given object. Interestingly, touch is also the first sense we experience inside the womb, and the last sense to fleet us upon dying. In infant monkeys, research was carried out to see if a mother’s touch or basic nutrition was more desired. It found that infant monkeys always chose a warm, comforting surrogate mother (warm blanket wrapped around a wire mannequin) over a cold, nurturing surrogate mother (wire mannequin with milk bottle). Moreover, strong infant-parent touching in humans has been shown to increase attachment levels and enhance the baby’s emotional and physiological health.

For products, it has long been established that touch is hugely important in how people perceive an item they wish to purchase, with there being both a functional and emotional aspect to touching. They can have fun by touching a product or judging its quality and value. In particular, there exists strong evidence that the mere shape of a wine glass has a direct influence on the taste experience. Hence, my surprise that Streets of Spain had used take-away coffee cups to serve their wine in. I know to serve so many people in a cost-effective way may be the reason, still, I think that plastic cups with which a deposit is given and returned would be a much better system to showcase the wine and create less waste.

The Soundscape Experience

Inside the Soundscape Experiment room.

I was very intrigued by this aspect of the event. It was an opportunity for people to go deeper with the brand and experience something different and new. Soundscape was an experiment into the relationship between sound and taste; the first of its kind in the world. Nick Ryan, a world-renowned pioneering composer, was tasked with interpreting the taste of the wine and creating a musical journey for people to take when sampling a Cava, a Reserva, and a Gran Reserva; which would mimic the condition known as synaesthesia; where the stimulation of one sense evokes the sensation of another.

The room provided a feeling of immersion, and four Funktion One speakers aiming at us added to the experience (I love Funktion One sound-systems). Nick created three different compositions to accompany each of the wines. For each of the pieces there were three cues to indicate the stages of tasting: smell, initial taste, and finish.

For me, although an intriguing experience, I found the sounds distracting, which made it hard to find my own subjective opinion about the taste of the wine. That being said, I did feel like Nick’s vision of the wine came through the music, which nonetheless, resulted in a very interesting experiment.

Quiero todo el vino por favor

Final Thoughts…

We experience and interpret life through our senses by physiological methods of perception, so a sense is a faculty by which outside stimuli are perceived. They are a complex mechanism designed to aid our survival — well, back in our more primitive days at least. No longer just for survival, our senses allow us modern humans to seek pleasure in the world. This is why our senses are so important. Now I know what you may be thinking, that these things just happen naturally, and that the senses are as well serviced in an iconic street market such as Borough Market, for instance. However, that is not the point. Experiences like Borough Market have been around for many years, and as a result, have grown a sensory atmosphere organically. For producers of experiences, we need to replicate these types of immersive and authentic atmospheres with limited time and resources. Subsequently, plan for multi-sensory experiences in the design phase, harness their influence, and watch your live events gain deeper emotive and immersive qualities, enhanced memory retention, and ultimately, improve the chances of creating a positive impact on your target audience.

Overall, I found “Streets of Spain” to be an excellent example of a well designed and executed multi-sensory experiential campaign. The event felt genuine, paid attention to how our brains works, and created a great platform for brand engagement. Well done to all involved.

Look out for my future blog post on the topic of sensory psychology. Get involved by leaving a comment below, or by following me on Twitter where you can find me @eventpsychology.